Home Movies

Building a Home Movie Studio and Getting Your Films Online
Lancaster and Conti
2001

Submitter: Here’s a submission of a book I weeded from my library’s collection. The book predates YouTube by several years and talks about publishing your movies using tools like RealPlayer and FrontPage. (Remember them?) It’s horribly outdated and belongs nowhere near a library shelf.

Holly: I do remember them! I learned to make a web page with straight-up HTML, and then FrontPage blew my mind. What possible reason could a library have for keeping this? It was a great pick in 2001, but within five years it was out of date. I love the subtitle, which ends with “today’s hottest source – the Internet.” Profound.

12 Responses to Home Movies

This takes me back, because before I became a librarian I was involved in a startup/Internet movie studio that was looking to market our films to these kinds of players. I believe that company is now in Florida, doing EPKs (Electronic Press Kits). They probably got rid of all their books from this era long ago.

I was surprised recently to learn that RealPlayer still exists. Who on earth uses it? It would be like learning that someone out there was still playing their music on WinAmp, desperately searching for new skins to adorn their player.

I was curious myself after I posted, and when I go to the WinAmp site, the download link takes me to a forum post saying downloads are “temporarily unavailable”. Seeing as how that post is from 2014, I’m guessing “temporarily” has changed to “permanently”.

I personally preferred MusicMatch Jukebox, and I remember at one point around 2001 actually shelling out $40 for a lifetime license, because clearly nothing was going to come along that could improve on what they were doing, right? If I’m remembering correctly, even before iTunes made it superfluous, the program itself had become so bloated with nonsense features that within a year i’d wished i had that money back.

WinAmp is still around, sort of. The source code and brand were sold to a new owner, and for various complicated legal reasons they’re having to rewrite large chunks of it from scratch with a small team of mostly part-timers. Estimated release date for v5.8 is “shortly before Half-Life 3”.

Fifteen years down the road, this has become rather quaint, but a nice chunk of technology history. I also like the “street price” listed after the MSRP. “Uh, yeah…we just got this ‘shipment’ in last night.”